European libraries make efforts for integration

From 3 to 4 November 2011, about 40 specialists of e-collections from European libraries meet in the National Library of Portugal. The eBooks on Demand (EOD) libraries have recently launched a common search engine for finding books which already are or will be digitised, and will have hackdays in Lisbon for providing information from library catalogues and repositories in social web and other platforms.

The EOD search (http://search.books2ebooks.eu) currently makes available over 2,5 million records from 15 libraries, and gives direct access to already digitised items as well as books offered for digitisation on demand. “Our aim is that European cultural heritage would be only one mouse-click away from the readers and the EOD search enables that,” said Silvia Gstrein, the EOD Project Coordinator.

About 1000 books digitised with the EOD service are also visible via Europe’s digital library Europeana. “Our next step is to make more records from EOD libraries visible via Europeana and integrate the EOD service also with other platforms,” assures Gstrein.

The EOD service was originally started by 13 European libraries from 8 countries in 2006. The development of the service is co-financed by the European Commission Culture Programme. Now already 30 libraries from 12 countries offer the EOD service.